Save the Last Dance
by Serrafina
Summary: Kara thinks Lee has terrible taste in music.


Title: Save the Last Dance  
Disclaimer: not mine.  
Beta: amaliak.  
AN1: Written as a gift for rayruz on the livejournal comm pilots_presents.  
AN2: Set in early Season 1, circa Water. Also I sincerely apologize for the title.  


* * *

"_What_ is that?"

"It's music, Kara. You may have heard of it."

"That's not music, Lee. I know music. That's some loser whining about things he's too lazy to change."

Lee frowned. He was lying in his bunk, curtain partially drawn, and Kara, having just come in from CAP, was standing across the room as she shimmied out of her flightsuit. He glared at her back and turned the volume up higher on his player.

"And what would you prefer? Death metal? Punk rock?"

She stripped off her sweat-dampened tanks. He turned his gaze to the top of his rack.

Kara snorted. "No, just a little something called _talent_, Lee. You may have heard of it."

He scowled down at the case. "The…Boys of Babylon are very talented, I'll have you know."

"Is that right." It was not a question.

"In any case," Lee said, "you won't have to put up with it for very long. I don't know how much longer these batteries will last."

There was a long pause. Lee looked out the curtain again. She was standing in her g-shorts and a pair of what he hoped were clean tanks, fiddling with something in her locker. She sighed. He glanced away, feeling oddly guilty as though he were intruding on a private moment.

"What are you doing with that thing anyway?" Her voice had lost the combative edge and now she just sounded weary.

He shrugged, but of course she would have had to be looking at him to see it. "Got it from the auction." He turned the case over in his hands, studying the three young men glaring stoically against a backdrop of what appeared to be a desert. It was a little too good to be a painted set piece, so Lee figured it was probably a green screen, clearly meant to symbolize the great depth of their passion. Or something like that. Though he wasn't sure why they weren't wearing shirts. "Don't know whose it was. But it's probably the last _Boys of Babylon_ CD left in the fleet." He levered himself up to sitting. "Don't you think that means something?"

She turned around, dressed now, and sat on her bunk to pull on socks. "Yeah, Lee, it means Rodeo had shitty taste in music."

He realized then that she'd recognized the music. Maybe as soon as she'd walked in.

"You ask me," she continued, "it's a damn shame. All the music in the Twelve Colonies, and this crap is what we're left with?"

"It's not that bad."

"Really? Because I'm pretty sure that singer just tried to rhyme _forever_ with _foot lever_."

"Well…_foot lever_ could rhyme with _forever_."

She shoved her feet in her boots a bit more angrily than he thought was warranted. "Just because you _can_ do something doesn't mean you _should_, Apollo."

"Advocating restraint, Starbuck? I'm shocked."

"Yeah, well, I like to keep you on your toes. Besides, it's more like advocating for the integrity of the arts. See you around."

She stood up and started stomping her way to the hatch. He sat up with such haste that he almost cracked his skull open on the top of his rack.

"Hey, wait—"

She turned around. "What?"

He leaned past the curtain to look at her. "Where are you going? You just got off CAP."

Kara's eyes shifted around the empty bunkroom, and if he didn't know better Lee might have thought she was _nervous_.

"Rec room." She grinned a little too broadly. "Hey, maybe Gaeta will be there—I hear he's into opera, classical, that kind of thing. Maybe he'd know where I could find a recording, teach you about _real_ music."

And with that, she strode out of the room, leaving him alone with _The Boys of Babylon_.

The Cylons attacked a few hours later. Lee and Kara both launched with the alert fighters, just in time to hear Matchpoint's comm go dead and see his Viper blink out of existence on dradis.

They only lost one. It could have been worse. Lee flew a six-hour CAP after the skirmish, and after that he had repairs to do and reports to file. He didn't make it back to the bunkroom until well into the night shift, and nearly all of the curtains were drawn, soft sounds of sleep filling the room. Kara's bunk was empty, but he was too tired to think about that.

The next day, when Lee returned from his shift in CIC, he almost didn't notice the wrapped package resting on top of his blanket until he was about to sit on it. Sweeping it up in one hand, he turned it over before leaning back and pulling the curtain closed. It was small, easily held in one fist, and wrapped in paper. He looked closer. It was wrapped in one of his mission briefings from the week before. Well, at least somebody was using it.

Nobody had supplies to waste, so there wasn't any tape. Lee tugged the edges free, and the wrapping easily slipped away.

Batteries. Somebody had left four standard-charge batteries on his rack.

There was a note penned in the margins of his briefing. _For the last dumbass boy band in the universe._

The next day, there was an accident in the hangar bay and Lee spent most of his off-shift trying to keep their planes space-worthy while two knuckledraggers recovered under Doc Cottle's watchful eye. So it was two days after the batteries and three days after _The Boys of Babylon_ when he finally caught up with Kara in the mess and asked her about it.

"Won 'em at cards," she said, avoiding his eyes as she piled the latest slop they were calling food onto her tray. "Off of Matchpoint," she added, almost as an afterthought. But her tone was too deliberate, the weight of her words too carefully measured to truly pass as casual. She walked off to an empty table without looking back.

Lee didn't notice how long he'd been staring after her until Twofer nudged him with an elbow. Right. He quickly filled his own plate and dropped down into the seat opposite her.

Kara made a face and set her fork down. "This is disgusting."

"We're lucky to have it," Lee said. "We'd be totally frakked without the food processor ship."

"I'll throw in an extra flyby next CAP to express my gratitude," Kara said flatly. She took another bite and grimaced.

Lee didn't blame her; it was disgusting. Still, he didn't really want to discuss the wretched state of their rations. "Why'd you give me batteries?"

She looked at him like he was stupid. "Well I don't have anything that takes batteries."

Lee snorted. "Is that so?"

She narrowed her eyes. "That is so. I'll have you know, I don't need any extra assistance." She paused. Lee ate; Kara smushed her food around with her fork. "Besides, it would feel pretty morbid, using them now that he's dead. I might not have cleaned him out at the triad table if I'd known he was gonna die the next day, you know?"

Lee was silent, just looking at her. She glanced away before looking back at him.

"Anyway," she said, her voice lighter, "you obviously don't have any problem with that, what with listening to Rodeo's frakking boy bands and all."

"You're just a cynic, Starbuck. It's got a great…dance beat."

Kara arched one eyebrow. "I didn't see you dancing."

"Well dancing by yourself isn't that much fun."

"Maybe you just aren't doing it right."

"You offering to teach me?"

Kara pulled back slightly, wary. "You asking me to dance?"

"Don't be ridic—"

_"Captain Adama to the CIC, paging Captain Adama to the CIC."_

"Frak." Lee shoved his tray to the side and stood up. "I gotta go," he said, but Kara just waved him off, her attention already back on her food.

In CIC, Colonel Tigh all but threw his plan for the next refueling op in his face, demanding that he redo it. In a fit of pique, Lee snapped that he wasn't trained for this.

Tigh just shook his head, mouth twisted into what seemed like a permanent scowl. "Then what exactly were you doing in War College?"

Lee wasn't in the best of moods when he got back to the bunkroom, wishing once again that…well, he didn't entirely see the point in wishing for anything specific. He knew the list would be far too long if he started. Fortunately, the bunkroom was nearly empty since it was in the middle of the shift. Most of the pilots were either on duty or in the rec room, except for Chatterbox who passed Lee on her way out the hatch.

Lee sank down onto his rack, shoving the newly-acquired paperwork aside. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the bulkhead. Just breathed in and out for a moment.

"Hey, Apollo."

He opened one eye, then the other. So the bunkroom wasn't as empty as he'd thought. Starbuck had one hand curled around the edge of her curtain, pushed back just enough that he could see her face.

"I believe you owe me a dance."

He closed his eyes again, letting his head thunk back against the wall. "Not right now, Kara."

"Uh-uh," she said, and he could hear her shoving the curtain aside and getting to her feet. "Nope, you don't get to stand a girl up like that, especially when it was your frakking idea in the first place.

He opened his eyes, and now she was standing right in front of him, grinning expectantly and holding out one hand. He stared at it.

"Come on, Lee. You're the one who questioned my dancing abilities—"

Lee frowned, pretty sure that it had been the other way around.

"—now get off your ass and give us some music."

Really, there wasn't much point in arguing with Starbuck when she got an idea in that stubborn head of hers. And that was absolutely the only reason he left the paperwork on his mattress and stood up to get the player out of his locker.

"Got batteries?" Kara asked over his shoulder.

"I knew you had an ulterior motive in giving me those."

"Yeah, I just wanted to see you shake those hips. And I gotta say, so far I'm pretty disappointed."

In a move that was far more fluid than he'd anticipated, Lee hit 'play' and spun around, suddenly very close to Kara as the dulcet tones of _The Boys of Babylon_'s lead singer filled the room.

She didn't back down, only shoving the table out of the way with one foot and shimmying backwards so that they had more space, dragging him along with her hands on his hips.

_The Boys of Babylon _didn't really have a good beat, or a good anything, but it had been far too long since Lee had danced, and in the days since the end of the worlds the thought of dancing hadn't even crossed his mind. Until today, of course.

Kara was quiet for a bit, eyelids drooping lower as they did an odd sort of swaying two-step.

Bad music was no excuse for such lousy dancing, so Lee moved one of her hands to his shoulder and started leading her around the room in an improvised version of the kinds of 'high society' dances his mother had deemed so important. It didn't match the music at all, but judging by her smile, Kara didn't seem to mind.

"What was he like?" Lee asked after a minute. "Rodeo."

"First rule of dancing, Lee: never talk about dead people. It's depressing."

"Sorry sir, oh wise dance instructor," he said, spinning her and then pulling her back into his arms.

"That was better," she said. "Looks like you're learning. Now, enough of this drivel. This might be our last chance. Time for some _real_ music." With that, she dropped his hand and stepped away, snagging something from her own bunk.

A music disc, he realized as she cut off the song that was playing and slipped her mystery disc into the player. It started with a piano. A piano with what sounded like a whole frakking symphony for backup.

"Now, Cadet, this is what we call a _waltz_." Kara grabbed one of his hands and set the other one on her waist. "Just remember this: if you can count, you can waltz. Repeat after me: one, two, three..."

He laughed; she stomped on his foot until he started counting. And they danced.


End file.
